Excerpt below is unedited draft prior to publication
This is my favorite chapter, and I love teaching folks how to use the “Growth Matrix Optimizer™” , (or we also refer to to it as the Big and Easy Tool) to choose, size and prioritize their events. More importantly, this tool is great for doing the same with almost any initiative, increasing sales, reducing expenses, or virtually any strategic ideas to explore. Often time’s businesses try to do everything, and do none of them well. This tool will get you focused on the events or initiatives that will produce the best results with a minimum amount of effort. You can learn more about the tool at my website, visit http://www.peerbenchmarking.com/strategic-analysis-tool/

Engage your staff

One of the best things about this tool is that it trains your staff to think strategically, and to better understand the relationships of revenues, expenses, resources and priorities. Refer to the case study from Linda on this topic to really grab hold of its effectiveness. When you teach your staff how to size and prioritize, they start thinking like that, and that provides leverage to your efforts, and eliminates them bringing you ideas that don’t make sense. Hosting a meeting to work though the current ideas on almost anything gets them fully bought in, and then they are more of a team. I love using it for topics like how can we be more efficient or increase sales, but it’s a great tool for planning future events, using the list provided in the book, or yours and their ideas.

Tracking your results

If you can, always assign a unique code to each event. A number can be just fine, and hopefully your computer sales system will allow you to enter such a code, so you can track which events brought the most clients(or prospects), and even which events produce produced the clients that spend the most. If your system won’t track them, just keep a spread sheet and have everyone keep track of their clients and send them in or write them down for later entry into the spreadsheet. Eventually you may learn which events are truly the best, and need less of this tracking, but it’s not very hard and can yield big results.